Law enforcement officers are often faced with the task of pursuing suspects in vehicles. In the United States, police pursuits of vehicles are responsible for hundreds of deaths each year, and millions of dollars worth of property damage. These vehicle pursuits cost the law enforcement community significant time, effort, cost, and legal fees as a result of lawsuits from victims of car chases gone wrong. As a result, the guidelines for when to pursue and when not to pursue a suspect are constantly changing, and vary from state to state. This can result in significant problems for the law enforcement community in determining how to react when faced with a vehicle pursuit situation, where a law enforcement officer may have to make an immediate determination, in the field, as to whether the risk to public safety from initiation of a pursuit outweighs the risk to the public from letting the occupants of a pursued vehicle escape.
A number of methods and apparatus to assist in the task of safely stopping a pursued vehicle have been proposed. These include the use of tire deflation devices that are deployed in front of a moving vehicle to puncture one or more tires as the vehicle passes over the device. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,611,408, 5,839,849, 6,623,205, and 6,527,475. These devices, however, all require the placement of the deflation device in front of the tires of the vehicle being pursued, and all result in the puncturing of one or more tires, thus damaging the vehicle without necessarily stopping it safely.
Another proposed vehicle stopping apparatus includes the use of a loop, including spiked portions, that can be deployed in front of a moving vehicle and that is wrapped up onto the axle of the vehicle when the spiked portion attaches to the tires passing over it. See U.S. Patent Application No. 2005/0225163, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Again, however, this device must be placed in front of the tires of the vehicle being pursued, and may also result in the puncturing of one or more tires of the targeted vehicle with associated damage.
Other proposed vehicle capturing devices have included the use of hooks, or other grabbing mechanisms, that are mounted on a pursuing vehicle to directly engage the rear of a pursued vehicle. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,107,312, 2,157,612, 2,194,623, and 5,839,759. These devices, however, all appear to require that the pursuing vehicle is positioned directly behind the pursued vehicle and physically impacts the pursued vehicle to engage the device. This may result in the need for highly dangerous maneuvering at high speed by the pursuing vehicle in order to use the device, and may result in significant damage to the vehicle being grabbed.
Other means of disabling a vehicle have been proposed. These include the use of electromagnetic, microwave, ultraviolet, or other appropriate signals that are transmitted to a vehicle to disrupt and/or stop the vehicle's engine. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,952,600 and 5,503,059. These devices can, however, pose an inadvertent threat to equipment such as police and emergency vehicle radios, traffic signals, cell phones, and pacemakers located within the range of the transmitter, as well as the pursuit vehicles themselves.
As such, there is still a need for a vehicle capture device that can be deployed safely and efficiently to stop a vehicle without permanently damaging the vehicle or requiring dangerous maneuvering by the pursuing vehicle prior to deployment.